Esperanza » (First Edition)

TRISH J. MACGREGOR is an astrologer and student of metaphysics. She was raised in Caracas, Venezuela, near the South American setting of Esperanza. She now lives in Florida, where she writes the Sidney Omarr Day-By-Day Astrology Guides. 

High in the Andes lies the city of Esperanza, partly in our world, partly in the next. The spirits of Light and Darkness are battling for control. Tess Livingston, FBI agent, is pulled into this battle, where she will find power and a love that transcends time.

Publishers Weekly

Set in Ecuador, this so-so supernatural thriller from MacGregor (Kill Time) mixes time travel with a centuries' long struggle between good and evil. When two strangers--Tess Livingston, an FBI agent, and Ian Ritter, a Minneapolis journalism professor who looks like George Clooney--are marooned at a remote bus station high in the Andes, they wind up taking a detour to the town of Esperanza, where they attract the unwelcome attention of Dominica, a shape-shifting spirit who can inhabit human bodies. Dominica is stunned to realize that both Tess and Ian are "transitionals," souls of people "nearly dead in the physical world" who pose a threat to her kind, brujos, ghosts unable to move into the afterlife. In a flashback to Minnesota in 1968, Ian emerges from a coma with memories from his future existence and embarks on a half-hearted attempt to prevent some of history's tragedies like Martin Luther King's assassination. Action that often drags and characters few will care about don't help a half-baked premise. (Sept.)